How to use technology in sales to help your sales team hit targets and increase revenue

In the second interview with Pete Wickham, Kluster’s Head of New Business, we discussed the role of technology in sales, and how it can be best used to enhance a sales team’s performance.

Pete, thank you for your time. Please introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about Kluster.

Thanks for having me. I’m Pete. I am one of the sales leaders at Kluster and Kluster is a revenue analytics platform and we help sales organisations understand what’s going on from lead all the way through to renewal, and really help with rep coaching and help them get the best out of their team.

In your experience, how are sales leaders using technology to hit targets and increase revenue?

I think it’s been a massive change in the last five years. Where now, if you not using your own data to track performance and work out what’s going on, then you are the last at the table to be honest. More so than ever, sales leaders want to understand why someone was successful in the last three months, what they can do to help them be more successful for the next three months.

Gone are the days were where you take the average of the team and just apply it to everyone because it’s definitely not a one size fits all market anymore. So there’s technology for performance forecasting, even down to activity, how many dials and emails people are sending these days; so you can get pretty granular.

And how are sales leaders and sales managers using data to manage their team’s performance?

In a couple of different ways. I think it depends on the type of sales org you are. I know for us personally, we don’t track the number of calls and emails somebody sends, unless they’re not getting results. It’s not necessarily like a KPI tracking tool.

It’s more a case of, we are there to help someone if someone’s not successful in our business, our goal as a leader is to wrap your arms around them a little bit and coach them and make sure they’ve got everything they need to be successful. And sometimes a lot of answers lie in the data. It could be that somebody’s just speaking to the wrong type of customer or maybe they’re performing their activity at a poor choice of day for a particular region.

There’s a lot of different reasons for why somebody might be successful in one area and not the other, and data and tracking tools are really helpful to uncover that.

With team performance overall, you can use the tools to basically understand, right, if we’re having great success in this area, we’re going to want to double down there and do more in this particular space. And I think, for most tech companies and sales teams, the targets are always getting bigger, there’s always more stuff to do. It’s not like for the sales team, there’s more hours suddenly available in the day. So it’s about becoming more efficient. If you’re having great success with this type of person / persona, or these types of businesses, it’s about identifying that as quickly as possible, and then getting the team to focus on that as much as they can.

Should sales, AI and technology led sales enablement be an integral part of sales teams tools, or is there still an opportunity to adopt other strategies for just as effective outcomes?

AI’s such a good buzzword at the moment in the market, but I think technology will never really replace the human part of enablement. I definitely don’t think reps respond that well to having a tool that says, “Hey, you know, you are missing this or you don’t do this”. You definitely need somebody who’s walked the path before to explain it to them, to say “I was here and I’ve been where you are, and this is what we need to do”. And I think that resonates really well.

Tools like that are fantastic for acting as a bit of a compass and identifying where to look and where to start, and speeding that process up. But I don’t think they’ll ever fully replace it. I think sales to trainers are very much going to have a firm place in most companies.

And I think if you’re a smaller business, often these techs are quite expensive. So I think there’s a lot more other critical things, I think would be higher up the list before you buy an AI enablement tool.

Click here to catch up on the first video with Pete.